This blog has followed compressed biogas (CBG) through its stack of incentives, the gap between plants and pipelines and the 43% rise in the price it fetches. In August the Cabinet put most of those pieces into one scheme. GOBARdhan, the National Circular Bioenergy Scheme, has Rs 23,731 crore for 2026-27 to 2035-36, an administered price of Rs 2,110 per MMBtu, and a goal of about 5 million standard cubic metres of CBG a day (MMSCMD) by 2035-36.

This piece does not repeat the earlier ones. It asks whether the target adds up: how far today’s plants are from it, who is obliged to buy the gas, what the money covers, and what the new price means for a plant of the size India actually has.

What the scheme offers

The Cabinet release, the launch release of 1 October and the September guidelines are reported differently on capital assistance; this blog could not open any of them. The rupee split of the outlay between pillars has not been published.

The target is more than ten-fold

The government’s own release gives the baseline. On 6 August 2026 the GOBARdhan registration portal counted 217 commissioned plants producing 0.4 MMSCMD, with 339 under construction and 1,908 registered. Going from 0.4 to 5 MMSCMD is a multiple of 12.5, more than the “nearly ten-fold” in the launch coverage.

The more telling number is output per plant. 0.4 MMSCMD across 217 plants is about 1,843 cubic metres a day each, or about 1.3 tonnes at 0.72 kg per cubic metre. In January 2026, 132 commissioned plants were reported at 920 tonnes a day, about 7 tonnes each. That can only have been capacity: 0.4 MMSCMD is about 288 tonnes a day from 217 plants. On those two figures, the average commissioned plant is producing about 19% of what it was built for. Neither source states its basis clearly and the portal does not publish capacity, so this is an inference, not a measured utilisation rate. But it says the first problem is not the number of plants. If the remaining 4.6 MMSCMD came from plants that perform like today’s average, it would take about 2,496 more of them.

Who has to buy the gas

The scheme’s demand guarantee is the CBG blending obligation on city-gas companies, rising to 5% from 2028-29. It applies only to CNG for vehicles and piped gas for homes. PNGRB’s statistical booklet puts all city-gas sales at 17,061 million cubic metres a year, about 46.7 MMSCMD, and that total also includes industrial and commercial customers. Even 5% of all of it would be about 2.3 MMSCMD, under half the 5 MMSCMD target. City-gas volumes will grow by 2035-36, but on today’s base the mandate cannot absorb the target on its own. The rest has to go to GAIL’s pool, to industry, or into pipelines, and only 24 of 207 functional plants were piped into a city-gas network in August, with 15 more in progress.

What the money covers, and what the price is worth

The published pillars allow a rough check on the Rs 23,731 crore. Adding 4.6 MMSCMD means about 3,312 tonnes a day of output. Even if every new plant ran at full capacity, capital assistance would cost about Rs 4,140 crore at the guideline rate and Rs 6,624 crore at the Cabinet-stage rate; real plants need more capacity than output, so the true figure is higher. The affordability support to the pooling operator, capped at Rs 10 a kilogram, would cost up to about Rs 1,314 crore a year once the target is reached. Pipelines, guarantees and the challenge fund come on top. The outlay is not obviously short, but it has little room for the target to be reached early or for capital assistance to run at the higher rate.

For a plant, the new price matters a great deal. At about Rs 98 a kilogram instead of Rs 69, a plant making the current average of 1.3 tonnes a day would earn about Rs 4.7 crore a year instead of Rs 3.3 crore. A 10-tonne plant running full would earn about Rs 36 crore. The difference between those two figures, more than the price itself, is what decides whether a plant pays back, which is why feedstock supply and offtake matter more than the headline price.

What would fix this

• The GOBARdhan portal should publish, for every commissioned plant, its design capacity and monthly output, so that utilisation can be tracked rather than inferred from a national average.
• The Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas should publish the rupee allocation to each of the six pillars and the year-by-year spending plan.
• The scheme should publish a demand plan that shows how much of the 5 MMSCMD will go to the city-gas mandate, GAIL’s pool, industry and pipelines.
• Capital assistance should be paid partly on measured output, not only on installed capacity, so the scheme pays for gas made rather than plants built.

These are proposals from this blog, not recommendations any agency has adopted.

What this piece could not establish

The Cabinet and launch releases, the guidelines and the PNGRB booklet could not be opened directly; figures come from their text as indexed by search engines and from news reports. The PNGRB booklet’s year was not stated in the text found. The January figure of 920 tonnes a day is read here as capacity; if it was output, the two official figures contradict each other. The per-plant output assumes a density of 0.72 kg per cubic metre and the per-kilogram price uses the lower of two reported conversions (Rs 98 rather than Rs 105). The split of city-gas sales between vehicles, homes and industry was not found, so the mandate’s ceiling is an upper bound. Capital-assistance estimates assume new capacity equals new output and are a floor.

Sources and caveats

About this article: Researched, written and edited by Umashankar Triplicane Dwarakanathan, with AI research assistance; every figure is meant to trace to the primary source cited. See the Editorial Policy for how sourcing, AI use and corrections work.